Columbia, NYU-Poly power $15M clean-tech plan

Companies such as HEVO Power, which has developed charging technology for electric cars, may get a boost from PowerBridgeNY.

A new state program that will provide $15 million to jump-start the clean-tech industry in New York is set to launch in the city this month out of Columbia University and the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. Organizers expect dozens of applicants to receive as much as $150,000 apiece through the program, which is an unusual collaboration between normally competitive institutions.

Funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the program will furnish $5 million to each of three centers—the third is High Tech Rochester Inc., a nonprofit venture development organization—during the next five years. The "proof-of-concept" centers will help university researchers validate ideas and launch commercial startups in areas including energy distribution and efficiency, renewable energy, smart grid applications and building efficiency.

"The goal is to take promising clean-energy technology out of university research labs and try to create as many clean-tech startups as possible," said Orin Herskowitz, vice president of intellectual property and technology transfer for Columbia University, and the university's point person for PowerBridgeNY, the umbrella name for the two New York City centers.

Few clean-tech startups in New York

Announced last January, PowerBridgeNY will give New York City a boost in a sector that has played second—or third—fiddle in the tech boom. Out of some 900 startups born here in the past 10 years, clean-tech companies comprise a mere handful. Of the 15 to 18 new companies that launch out of Columbia University each year, only one or two have anything to do with clean tech. Venture capitalists interested in the sector typically bypass New York for Boston or California.

"We're in a city of investors who invest in software," said Jeremy McCool, founder and CEO of HEVO Power, a local startup that has developed a wireless charging technology for electric cars.

Clean tech is often capital intensive, complicated to explain and requires long validation times compared with e-commerce, ad tech or social media. That's a turnoff for investors looking for a cheaper, quicker payoff. Meanwhile, clean-tech innovators often are professors and post-docs who hatch ideas in the lab but have no idea how to get a product to market. PowerBridge will give them mentors and put them through bootcamp.

"A lot of PowerBridge is going to be helping these people connect with the community, real estate owners and developers, utilities and big corporations to help them understand where they fit in the market," said Micah Kotch, director of innovation and entrepreneurship at NYU-Poly. He said academic researchers need to develop an awareness of whether there's a market for their innovations.

"If you're a startup, you can't sell vitamins; you have to sell painkillers."

35% more startups

PowerBridgeNY is a striking collaboration among universities that normally are rivals. But proof-of-concept centers have been shown to work: There are 32 similar centers in the U.S. and three more that are on deck. A recent study of nine centers by the New York Academy of Sciences and the University of North Carolina found that their universities produced 35% more startups—324 vs. 240—after the centers were launched.

In New York, the program supplements other NYSERDA initiatives, including six clean-tech incubators. "If this works, we think there will be a lot of replication around the state," said Frank Murray Jr., CEO of NYSERDA.

Columbia's center, the Downstate Regional Energy Technology Accelerator, includes Stony Brook University, Brookhaven Labs and Cornell's NYC Tech. NYU Poly heads the other: the NYC Clean Economy Center, partnering with CUNY, and NYU's new Center for Urban Science and Progress. High Tech Rochester is leading the upstate effort. Information sessions begin in mid-September; the centers will accept proposals and assign mentors to would-be entrepreneurs starting in October. In March, winning teams will be announced.

Dozens of teams are expected to apply. One likely applicant is professor Roger Anderson of Columbia's Center for Computational Learning Systems. Already a three-time entrepreneur, having co-founded two energy companies and a software company, he's looking to develop software to help companies manage the complex job of routing energy—electricity, oil and natural gas—more efficiently to multiple markets. Mr. McCool's HEVO Power might not be eligible, since it's already a company, but he's got other ideas for startups, such as a technology that can provide a wireless exchange of energy between vehicles and buildings.

Alan West and Scott Banta, professor and associate professor, respectively, of chemical engineering at Columbia, have developed a process that uses that uses electricity to convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into liquid fuel.

The technology, they said, could be game changing, but it's too early to go directly to investors for money.

"The PowerBridge thing is perfect," said Mr. Banta. "They're looking to fund what we need to get off the ground and develop the company."

There's no shortage of similar ideas percolating in labs around the city.

"We have incubators and great research, but for many academics, there's a gap between what they have achieved in the lab and their level of comfort in starting a company," said Kurt Becker, NYU-Poly associate provost for research and technology initiatives, and a principal investigator for the NYU-Poly center. "It's an education process."

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